but because his ball was made of red courant jelly and was shaped like a lobster[8], none of the more literal-minded kids missed him, or his ball, very much when he was gone. As he grew older, he collected a cadre of followers, many just as goofily visionary as himself, but because age did not diminish his doctrinaire ways, he spent a good deal of his time banishing them from the group for failures of orthodoxy.

And They Threw Better Parties Too: Dada[9] actually preceded Surrealism, but where Surrealism was programmatic, Dada was anarchic--blossoming as it did from that hotbed of all things silly and tumultuous, Zurich, Switzerland[10]. Where the Surrealists spun intricate intellectual justifications for their odd doings, the Dadaists spun like Dervishes[11], spontaneously, joyously, out of control.

Who's Your Dada? Both Dada and Surrealism are remembered today more for their visual art than for their contributions to literature, but their influence on poetry is wide and deep. Any use of collage in poetry, including William S. Burroughs[12] and Brion Gysin's[13]cut-ups[14], owes a debt to the two movements, The so-called Eliptical Poets[15]--Susan Wheeler[16], C. D. Wright[17], et al--with their constitutional aversion to, and frustration of, linear/narrative expectations, are distant heirs. Even the current, celebrated and reviled, Flarf Movement[18] gets its aggressively nonsensical bent and love of provocation straight from Dada.